Musk unveils $100 billion annual payments to people without ID in US

Boss of X (formerly Twitter), Tesla and SpaceX Elon Musk has written that the US authorities are paying over $100 billion annually in benefits.

He wrote that these funds are paid to individuals without identifying documentation, Caliber.Az reports, citing Musk's message on X. 

"To be clear, what the DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] team and US Treasury [US Department of the Treasury] have jointly agreed makes sense is the following: 

- Require that all outgoing government payments have a payment categorization code, which is necessary in order to pass financial audits. This is frequently left blank, making audits almost impossible. 

- All payments must also include a rationale for the payment in the comment field, which is currently left blank. Importantly, we are not yet applying ANY judgment to this rationale, but simply requiring that SOME attempt be made to explain the payment more than NOTHING!

- The DO-NOT-PAY list of entities known to be fraudulent or people who are dead or are probable fronts for terrorist organizations or do not match Congressional appropriations must actually be implemented and not ignored. Also, it can currently take up to a year to get on this list, which is far too long. This list should be updated at least weekly, if not daily.

The above super obvious and necessary changes are being implemented by existing, long-time career government employees, not anyone from DOGE. It is ridiculous that these changes didn’t exist already! Yesterday, I was told that there are currently over $100B/year of entitlements payments to individuals with no SSN or even a temporary ID number. If accurate, this is extremely suspicious. When I asked if anyone at Treasury had a rough guess for what percentage of that number is unequivocal and obvious fraud, the consensus in the room was about half, so $50B/year or $1B/week!! This is utterly insane and must be addressed immediately."

By Naila Huseynova